Royal Calkins: News standards take a hit

When I read about the fake romance of the Notre Dame football player and how several media outlets got caught up in a big lie, my heart sank for a couple of reasons.

How could the hometown newspaper and then Sports Illustrated and the New York Times and the Associated Press all disseminate stories about the heartbroken star who lost his California girlfriend to leukemia when there was no California girlfriend, no leukemia, no anything? Has the practice of journalism slipped so far that no one checks anything anymore?

Secondly, I was upset because the editor of the hometown paper, the South Bend Tribune, is an old friend and colleague, Tim Harmon. I know him to be a worrywart, an exceptionally conscientious editor who pushed his people hard and set high standards.

Six months after Tim first became the top editor at a newspaper, I cautioned him that he seemed to be bouncing from personnel crisis to personnel crisis. Someone was always in trouble at Tim's paper for not making the grade. He was a taskmaster and it wore on him as well as his staff.

The blame for the fake stories out of Notre Dame — one was a Sports Illustrated cover story — rests with the football player and the Notre Dame publicity machine, but just as heavily on the South Bend Tribune reporter and his editors. Tim included, I imagine. They were responsible for the first story and several follow-ups, and it has always been true that if a respectable paper such as the Tribune publishes a story, other publications can feel fairly confident they could rely on the information.

Not anymore.

The Tribune sportswriter trusted the player and the Notre Dame officials who were spreading the story. AP, the Times and Sports Illustrated trusted the Tribune, and the readers were left with no one to trust.

Fortunately, in my years in journalism and my year as editor of The Herald, I haven't experienced anything of the sort — at least not anything of such scale. Careful readers, however, may have noticed our recent brush with fiction disguised as journalism.

Thursday's column was an apology and an explanation for a November column in which they — or, more precisely, Mike — wrote something he knew not to be true. That column referred to a website that reported the then-upcoming Big Sur Half Marathon would be testing runners for drugs. Mike, a strong advocate of drug testing for athletes, put that in the column in hopes it would scare off runners who use performance-enhancing drugs. He put it in the column though he knew it wasn't true. He's on the marathon board.

The column apparently caused quite a stir in marathon circles but I didn't hear about it until a week ago. I confronted Mike, who instantly confirmed what he had done. He defended his action as well-intended, which it was, but I made it clear that good intentions didn't make it right. As transgressions go, it wasn't in the same league as the Notre Dame whopper, but it was a transgression.

I considered killing the column forever. A reporter here who knowingly published a falsehood would be in the unemployment line the next week. But Mike isn't a journalist and I don't think he understood the significance of what he was doing. He does now. If you didn't see it, go back and read Thursday's column.

Some Herald staffers agree I did the right thing keeping the column alive. Others argue that I should have pulled the plug. I'm satisfied with the explanatory column and don't plan to reverse my decision to keep the column running. Still, I am very interested in what readers think.